Improving well-being at school
Since well-being has many facets, improving students’ well-being in schools requires a whole-school approach, involving both teachers and parents.
Schools should provide lessons focused on the responsible use of the Internet, the need to adopt a healthy lifestyle and how to prevent or cope with health problems, in collaboration with those involved, including health and social services, local authorities and civil society organisations.
Facts & figures
About 60% of school students report getting very tense when they study.[1]
Just over 60% of girls and 40% boys say they feel very anxious about doing tests at school, even when they are well prepared.[2]
Over 70% of parents say they would choose to send their children to a school with below-average exam results if students were happy there.[3]
What is well-being?
Well-being is the experience of health and happiness. It includes mental and physical health, physical and emotional safety, and a feeling of belonging, sense of purpose, achievement and success.
Well-being is a broad concept and covers a range of psychological and physical abilities. Five major types of well-being are said to be:
- Emotional well-being – the ability to be resilient, manage one’s emotions and generate emotions that lead to good feelings
- Physical well-being – the ability to improve the functioning of one’s body through healthy eating and good exercise habits
- Social well-being – the ability to communicate, develop meaningful relationships with others and create one’s own emotional support network
- Workplace well-being – the ability to pursue one’s own interests, beliefs and values in order to gain meaning and happiness in life and professional enrichment
- Societal well-being – the ability to participate in an active community or culture.
Overall well-being depends on all these types of functioning to an extent.[4]
“Having meaning and purpose is integral to people’s sense of well-being. Well-being involves far more than happiness, and accomplishments go far beyond test success.”[5]
Why is well-being important at school?
Well-being is important at school because schools have an essential role to play in supporting students to make healthy lifestyle choices and understand the effects of their choices on their health and well-being. Childhood and adolescence is a critical period in the development of long-term attitudes towards personal well-being and lifestyle choices. The social and emotional skills, knowledge and behaviours that young people learn in the classroom help them build resilience and set the pattern for how they will manage their physical and mental health throughout their lives.
Schools are able to provide students with reliable information and deepen their understanding of the choices they face. They are also able to provide students with the intellectual skills required to reflect critically on these choices and on the influences that society brings to bear on them, including through peer pressure, advertising, social media and family and cultural values.
There is a direct link between well-being and academic achievement and vice versa, i.e. well-being is a crucial prerequisite for achievement and achievement is essential for well-being. Physical activity is associated with improved learning and the ability to concentrate. Strong, supportive relationships provide students with the emotional resources to step out of their intellectual ‘comfort zone’ and explore new ideas and ways of thinking, which is fundamental to educational achievement.
Well-being is also important for developing important democratic competences. Positive emotions are associated with the development of flexibility and adaptability, openness to other cultures and beliefs, self-efficacy and tolerance of ambiguity, all of which lie at the heart of the Council of Europe Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture.
What are the challenges?
One of the challenges of trying to promote young people’s well-being in school is the multi-faceted nature of well-being. There are a number of different types of well-being, all of which need to be promoted to some extent to create an overall sense of well-being in a person. So, it is not possible to improve students’ well-being at school through single interventions or activities. Rather it requires the development of a ‘culture’ of well-being throughout the whole school and the active involvement of the whole staff, teaching and non-teaching, which can be difficult to achieve.
The promotion of well-being may sometimes appear to conflict with other school priorities, such as academic standards. Unreasonably high expectations, a regime of constant testing or an over-emphasis on the importance of academic performance may actually undermine student well-being.
In many cases schools do not have the freedom to make the changes to school life which might most benefit student well-being. They may have little control, for example, over formal examinations and tests, the content of curricula, the length of the school day or the physical school environment.
Nor have schools control over the many out-of-school influences on student well-being. What happens in the home and the family, local communities or social media can have as much, if not more, influence on student well-being as anything in school.
Finally, developing a sense of well-being in students is made all the more difficult when school staff themselves do not have a positive sense of well-being. Well-being at work is strongly related to stress. Stress at work is related to workload, quality of professional relationships, level of autonomy, clarity about one’s role, availability of support and the opportunity to be involved in changes which affect one’s professional life. High levels of stress can lead to demotivation, lack of job satisfaction and poor physical and mental health, which has a knock-on effect on students’ own well-being.
How can schools get active?
Addressing student well-being at school begins with helping students feel they are each known and valued as an individual in her or his own right, and that school life has a meaning and purpose for them. This can be achieved in a variety of small ways, the cumulative effect of which can have a very powerful influence on students’ sense of well-being. These include:
- providing opportunities for all members of the school community to participate in meaningful decision-making in school, e.g. through consultations, opinion surveys, referenda, electing class representatives, student parliaments, focus groups, in-class feedback on learning activities, and an element of student choice in relation to topics taught and teaching methods used;
- developing a welcoming environment where everyone at school can feel supported and safe through access to meaningful activities, e.g. clubs, societies, interest groups and associations dealing with issues of concern to young people, including health;
- taking steps to reduce the anxiety students feel about examinations and testing through the introduction of less stressful forms of assessment, e.g. formative assessment, peer assessment and involving students in the identification of their own assessment needs;
- using teaching methods that contribute to a positive classroom climate and well-being, e.g. cooperative learning, student-centred methods, self-organised time, outdoor activities;
- finding curriculum opportunities to talk about well-being issues with students, e.g. healthy eating, exercise, substance abuse, positive relationships;
- integrating democratic citizenship and education for intercultural understanding into different school subjects and extra-curricular activities, e.g. openness to other cultures in Religious Education, knowledge and critical understanding of human rights in Social Science, empathy in Literature;
- introducing student-led forms of conflict management and approaches to bullying and harassment, e.g. peer mediation, restorative justice;
- improving the physical environment of the school to make it more student-friendly, e.g. new furniture and fittings, carpeted areas, appropriate colour schemes, safe toilet areas, recreational areas;
- encouraging healthier eating by providing healthy options in the school canteen, e.g. avoiding high amounts of sugar, saturated fats and salt;
- working with parents to enhance students’ achievement and sense of purpose in school, e.g. on healthy food, safe internet use and home-school communications.
Individual initiatives like these can be brought together at the whole-school level through a policy development process which ‘mainstreams’ well-being as a school issue. This means giving attention to the potential effects of new policies on individual well-being - of students, teachers and others. Addressing student well-being at school always goes hand in hand with action to protect the health and well-being of teachers and other staff at school.
[1] OECD (2017). PISA 2015 Results (Volume III), p.40. Students’ Well-Being. Paris, France: OECD Publishing.
[3] Cowburn & Blow, ‘Wise up - Prioritising wellbeing in schools’
[4] Psychology Today, January 2019.
[5] Hargreaves & Shirley (2018), ‘Well-being and Success. Opposites that need to attract’.
Resources on Improving well-being at school
Related schools projects
Address: Via Polaresco 19, 24126 Bergamo.
Country: Italy
Project: “Bullying is not a game”
Working language during the project:
- Italian
Themes of the Council of Europe campaign “FREE to SPEAK, SAFE to LEARN - Democratic Schools for All” covered:
- Preventing violence and bullying
- Tackling discrimination
- Improving well-being at school
Competences from the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) addressed and where / how they were integrated:
- Valuing human dignity and human rights
Respect, human rights and fundamental freedoms were the focus of conferences and school activities. Linguistic, history and law lessons focused on themes such as equal dignity, cultural differences, status, abilities. Students understood how important it is to defend those who might be disempowered and disadvantaged within the community. - Responsibility
Thanks to targeted law lessons, students understood their duties and obligations and how they ought to act in relation to a particular situation, based on a value or set of values. They also understood the consequences of personal decisions and actions. - Co-operation skills
In technical and vocational subjects, students organised the design work in order to create different outputs. They cooperated with others in a reciprocal and coordinated manner, identifying roles, tasks, a time-schedule and setting group goals.
Target group age range:
- 15 - 19
Level of education:
- Upper secondary education
Short description of the project:
Over the years Istituto Caniana has paid a great deal of attention to many of the themes that are part of The Free To Speak Safe To Learn campaign. Some of the most relevant features and driving forces in our vision of the school are: spreading democratic culture among students, promoting self-expression, social inclusion and active citizenship.
Among all the different projects that take their inspiration from these guidelines the “Bullying is Not a Game” project touches on different aspects of the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. The project also implements the recent national school curricula guidelines in terms of civic education and social responsibility. Indeed, all these values, known as “Citizenship and Constitutional law” are now compulsory in the Italian Secondary school system, becoming an integral part of the final exam.
The project explores these subjects:
- Preventing violence, bullying and cyberbullying.
- Human rights violations.
- Making society a better place; free from violence and abuse.
Within the framework of this project the whole-school works at different levels (depending on the school year) on an anti-bullying, human rights programme, which promotes a learning environment where no violence is allowed. The project not only aims to make students aware of the problem, recognise it and act effectively against this kind of human rights violation but, with a domino effect, aims to spread knowledge of the democratic values in everyday life, within the family, the local community, making society a better place with no abuse or violence.
These themes are mainly directed at the younger students (1st, 2nd and 3rd year) as recent studies show that children aged between 11 and 17 are at the center of the problem (although the most critical period is between 11 and 13). The phenomenon occurs in school or in a virtual environment. But a bullying culture can develop in any context in which humans interact with each other, from the home to the workplace.
The project started with an online questionnaire addressed to all students, which produced some interesting statistics, supported with comments from the students on the phenomenon of bullying as it was personally experienced by them.
Over the course of two years, the project has seen a full programme of conferences, seminars and activities involving a large number of students and teachers.
The project has been developed thanks to the teachers (whom integrated their curricula programme) but also with the help of experts who held conferences and events to talk about the topic. Some of the most important have been:
Conference “Bullismo, cyber bullismo e molestie” held by a team of journalists from the national newspaper “Corriere della Sera”. The conference gave space also to a lively Q&A time with the students’ questions to the journalists.
Conference held by a lawyer and volunteer of the Bergamo UNICEF Committee. The conference inquired into the meaning of the terms "bullying" and "cyberbullying" (with practical examples) to reveal the civil and criminal consequences resulting from these acts.
Students attended the play “Banna il Bullo” (Ban the Bully), a show which broaches the issues of bullying and cyberbullying paying particular attention to the psychological and emotional dynamics involving parents and children.
Some classes (third year) took part in the “Inter-force Citizenship and Legality Education” project. It was a training activity promoted by the Vittime del Dovere Association, the State Police and the Territorial School Department. During the second part of the conference pupils could interact freely with the police officers about the issue.
Students got great results in different contests about bullying and cyberbullying and an internal exhibition showcasing their work was set up in the school’s hall and corridors.
Aims/objectives
- Preventing violence and bullying.
- Awareness of the bullying and cyber bullying phenomenon.
- Tackling discrimination.
- Knowledge and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
- Improving well-being at school.
- Critical thinking and reflection on the complexity of the contemporary world.
- Correct use of digital technologies and social media.
- Identification of dangerous situations online and offline.
- Team work skills: designing a multimedia product on the subject, implementing it through visual and communication tools, sharing ideas with the group and presenting the project to a wider audience.
Expected results/outcomes
- Students respect, protect and become promoters of the human rights
- Students promote social responsibility identifying and taking action against episodes of bullying they undergo or witness.
- Students improve their communication skills
- Student improve their digital and technological skills
- Students improve their ability to analyse issues and come up with solutions.
- Students improve their cooperative learning and team-work skills
- Multimedia outcome: video, digital animation, posters and T-shirts on the subject.
- Online campaign through the school’s Facebook page and website and during the final school year show which takes place in a theatre.
- Essays on the subject
Students ranked in the first place within the "Best Multimedia Works" category in the “Progetto Educazione alla Cittadinanza e alla Legalità” (launched by “Vittime del Dovere Association”) with the digital animation "Cyberbullying and cyberstalking: get to understand them to defend yourself" and with the following aims: "the messages of the individual graphics are original and they visually convey clear concepts". This video is permanently hosted on the homepage of school’s website.
Caniana Institute's commitment to the project was further recognised the the award of a special bronze medal by the Lombardy Regional Council for the largest number and the quality of work produced on cyberbullying and cyberstalking theme.
Students took part in the national competition “Scollègati dal bullismo” launched by the Ministry of Public Education. Their anti-bullying campaign got great results, and was selected at regional level by the USR Lombardia and sent over to the Ministry of Public Education to compete for the national stage of the contest.
Students took part in the video contest project “No Bullies be Friends”: kids simulated bullying situations in order to produce a short film. The activity helped them understand so much better the consequences of bullying on victims.
On the 7th February 2018 and 2019 our school joined the celebrations of “The National Day of Action against Bullying and Cyberbullying”, setting up an exhibition in the school. The exhibition showcases the students’ work which focuses on the main features of the problem. The exhibition was the results of the students’ analysis of the materials featured on different sites selected by the teachers and the free brain-storming that followed all activities and conferences. Students of the Graphic Design course made posters, videos and digital animations showcasing striking headlines and photographs, while students from the Fashion Design course made some really impactful T-shirts with No Bulls logos.
Changes
- Students adopt core human rights values in their every-day-life.
- Increased awareness of the students of bullying symptoms, online and offline.
- Teachers, parents and students take part together in the bullying prevention and intervention.
- Improvement on problem solving and team-work skills
- Visual and informative material was produced and remains a permanent source of knowledge and social condemnation of the phenomenon.
- Improvement in cooperation between the school and other stakeholders such as the State Police, the Territorial School Department, different Associations, Journalists, media and other institutions.
Challenges you faced
- very tight time schedule to organise some of the activities
- introduction of new elements and skills in the school year curricula programme
- designing the project exhibition and making it happen
Time-frame of the project:
School years 2017/18 and 2018/19 - the project is still ongoing.
Council of Europe materials on citizenship and human rights education used while preparing or implementing your practice:
- Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture
- Living Democracy - manuals for teachers
- Compasito
- Multimedia Material (ex. video “Beat Bullying”, series of cartoons “Democracy and Human Rights at School”, video “Corporal punishment at school: how two parents decided to change things”)
- Other: Law books, Italian Constitution, different online sources.
